Quote:
Originally Posted by cjlipps
What does work in practice? How do we generate enough revenue to pay off (yeah, right) over $16T in debt and operate a country?
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You don't.
So reducing taxes of the uber rich in the facile assumption that they will then invest all that money in new jobs for the likes of you and me is silly. They won't, so it wont' happen. All that will happen is the rich will sit on more money and spend that money as they see fit, including in other countries. Relieving the uber rich of their "impossible" tax burden will not return millions of jobs to the US because no matter what you do locally in the US with the current popultion in the next ten years or so you will never be able to compete economically with asia in terms of labor costs, so those jobs will not return ot the US. Not in sufficient quantities to grow the economy well enough to fix the problem.
So Romneys plan will fail.
Increasing the tax burden on the uber rich and "redistributing" the procedes to the regular schmucks like you and me will result in a small amount of money extra for those regular schmucks but it wont be enough to make any meaningful change in our lives. This is because when the handful of uber rich's monies are distributed amongst the hundreds of millions of regular schmucks the starting amount becomes an insignificant trickle when it's spread out amongst the hundreds of millions.
So Obamas plan will fail.
So what's the alternative? I have no idea. The US is screwed from what I can see or at least heading for some extremely rough waters which might, or might not, include a humungous waterfall or whirlpool or whatever.
The US needs to reign in it's spending, this is true, but it cannot as too many people are dependent on welfare and world reality does not allow us to refrain from war and military expenses.
So what the US needs to try and do is both reduce spending somewhat while simultaneously growing the economy. Sounds simple enough in theory but how do you actually do that? Well one way is to understand that it's not going to happen fast or easily. The world has changed and most of the proverbial "good middle class" jobs are gone and the US will have to compete more than effectively in order to get them back in such a way that it will re-inflate the post war high tech boom that provided the platform for every American to wind up with a house in the suburbs and a couple of cars in the garage - amongst other things...
I dont know how to do that. But a moribund fiddling with tax rates will not cut it. Americans will have to make do with less for some time, they will have to be more ingenious than they have been for a long time (and become much better educated) and they will have to understand that a country is not a business, and cannot be run like a business. It has to find a balance amongst many issues, social, economic, military, political etc and all the while be prepared to deal with a changing world and the likelyhood that despite the fondest dreams of the isolationists we do not have autarky, never did have autarky and certainly will not have any for the forseeable future, so we will have to be prepared to meet any military expenditures that will be forced on us by unforseen and unforseeable events, ruinously expensive though these will be.
- Peter.